Indiegogo wants large corporations to start crowd-funding too

Remember when Sony launched its own crowdfunding platform for new products last year? The idea was to spur innovation and new business ideas, leveraging the company’s vast resources alongside popular opinion to create products that were desirable from the start. And apparently, Indiegogo thought that was a pretty solid idea — the global crowdfunding platform today launched a new offering called “Enterprise Crowdfunding.” By giving large corporations “specific services for engaging with Indiegogo’s vast audience of early adopters, entrepreneurs, and makers,” the San Francisco-based company hopes to help “validate and optimize product concepts, as well as source new innovations.” While Indiegogo has long been used by individuals and smaller operations to raise capital for their grand ideas, the new Enterprise Crowdfunding solution serves a slightly difference purpose — in this case, it is not necessarily the money of Indiegogo backers the platform taps into, but rather their collective opinion. Indeed, the hope is that this new tool will help companies “mitigate a key risk factor in their R&D efforts — whether consumers actually want a certain product.” By democratizing the product selection process, companies may be able to save themselves from producing something no one will buy.